Part 4
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What’s happening back home, I wonder? Think, when we lived in our own burrows? Dry, soft, warm bodies…
Look, we can’t go on like this.
It keeps getting worse and worse wherever we go. Where ARE we going?
~Pipkin, Dandelion, and Silver, Watership Down
You’re only brave if you’re scared first. If you don’t actually overcome anything, then it’s not brave; you’re just a shell charging forward.
If a boy doesn’t like you, then why in the world would you want to be with him?
Mom had been full of these little gems. I’d thought they were bullshit. I’d roll my eyes and she’d just laugh at me, asking me to please be a little less like a stereotypical teen.
Of course, within the confines of The Hutch I had plenty of time to think about her and all her wisdom. She worked for a popular greeting card company and wrote page-a-day calendars as freelance. She studied the Bible, Aesop, and the Tao Te Ching for little nuggets of bullshit. I called them bullshit, saying they were nothing but sound bytes if no one ever did anything with them. So she would challenge me to do something. Course I never did.
I thought about that as I traveled the mine fields of group therapy. We had some fucked up kids in my group. Take Myra, the girl who seemed to be testing her democrat mother’s stance on abortion. She’d had three by age seventeen. Every morning she was defiant and angry about how it was her choice, goddammit. But she was in the room next to me, and I knew C.V. would sneak vodka in and they would talk and sometimes Myra would cry.
Then there was Pauline who had hypoglycemia and would chow down on sugar to trigger reactions whenever her parents did something she didn’t like. She was on a strict diet in The Hutch, and always had a chaperone with her at meals. Course, I think she had sugary foods smuggled to her at night, but her triggered attacks were met with swift matter of fact attitude within The Hutch. She couldn’t play the pity card, and she hated that.
The other kids were any mixture of drugs, rebellion, and the result of parental discounting. Political careers were so important that the kids were window dressings to a lovely home.
Monday’s group leader was Chad, a guy I’m pretty sure Chester Killian would have liked. He had a white button-down shirt and a blond ponytail. His green eyes were muddy and I didn’t trust them at all. A small divot in his ear indicated it had once been pierced, and I bet he was waiting to pull out his wild years stories to bond with us.
“Clara, you’ve been quiet. What’s on your mind?” he asked me on my second Monday at The Hutch. He’d just been giving Myra the advice that maybe she should think about the damage she’s doing herself rather than the effect she’s having on others’ lives. He’d sounded so much like Mom that I’d rolled my eyes.
I sat back in my chair and stared at my hands fiddling with my lace fingerless gloves that so conveniently hid the scars on my arms. “What you don’t get is that we do think about ourselves. We think of what will help.”
He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. Joseph, who sat opposite me in the circle as always, lifted his eyes from my hands to my face. I tried not to blush. “Help what?” Chad said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Help feel better. Help feel something. When there’s something missing, we do… things to help things feel like they’re not missing. It’s about right now. Not next week.”
Chad nodded slowly. “Very good. You’re saying Myra purposefully gets pregnant and then gets abortions in order to have control over her life.”
I shrugged at Chad. “If you say so.”
Myra glared at me. “And why are YOU here?” I gritted my teeth and looked down.
Chad looked around the circle. “While Myra was a bit blunt with her comment, she has a point, and you’ve been here a week. This is group therapy, Clara. This is a safe place. Can you talk to us?”
I thought about the cafeteria cliques, the secret vodka parties, the way Joseph had encouraged and praised me when he discovered I’d cut myself using only my fingernail. This place was anything but safe. But adults didn’t want to hear that. They didn’t want the illusion that they could create a safe place for teens shattered. To make kids truly safe, they’d have to lobotomize us and put us in solitary padded rooms.
I sighed. “Sure. I cut myself. Been doing it for years. My father never knew but his political adviser caught me. Freaked. Put me on suicide watch. Brought me here.”
“And do you want to kill yourself, Clara?”
I shut my mouth. The kitchen had been covered in blood. She’d been lying on the kitchen table, the blood pooling under her neck where it had been cut. it had run in a thin line to the edge of the table where it had dripped in slow, coagulating drops.
The fingerprints on the knife, the angle of the cut, the spray of the bright arterial blood, all indicated that it was suicide. Senator Daddy told tearful stories about schizophrenia and medication to the press, and he was the proper widower. His approval rating went up. He won his senate seat the following year. The same year I had developed my interest in knives.
Mom had had one more saying she enjoyed: steel weapons were stronger once they’d been through a fire, she’d say. And in humans, that fire is puberty.
I looked Chad in his muddy eyes and told him truthfully, “No. It’s not about suicide or even hurting myself. It helps to let the blood out.”
Steel is stronger when it goes through fire.
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